Zimbabwean President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, said that Zimbabwe’s founding president Robert Mugabe died of “advanced cancer” at the hospital in Singapore on September 6.
“Doctors had stopped treatment… because of age and also because cancer had spread and it was not helping anymore,” said Mnangagwa.
Mugabe’s health deteriorated rapidly after the ousting, and he was said to have made several trips to Singapore to seek treatment.
When asked, Mugabe’s nephew Leo Mugabe told AFP that he had “no comment on that”.
The family had previously downplayed Mugabe’s frequent trips to Singapore as necessary for cataract treatment.
In 2011, whistle-blower site, Wikileaks, published a diplomatic cable which said that Mugabe had prostate cancer.
The cable, written in 2008 by the US embassy in Harare, said the former president had five years left to live at the time.
Mugabe is expected to be buried next month at a monument for national heroes in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare.
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He was toppled in a military-backed coup, on November 2017, ending an increasingly iron-fisted rule marked by political oppression and economic ruin.
A funeral service attended by African leaders was held at the National Stadium Sept. 14, now lying in state at his home in Harare while a mausoleum is being built for him at the national shrine.
President Mnangagwa is in the U.S. for the 74th session of the United Nation General Assembly (UNGA74), which President Muhammadu Buhari is also attending.